Specialist Solution Architect - Lightwell

Job Summary:

The Red Hat Technology Sales team is looking for a Lightwell Specialist Solution Architect (SSA) to join our team. This position assumes a crucial role in providing expert deep technical sales support for the seamless execution of Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies related to Red Hat Lightwell.
Your primary focus will be to remove the organizational, technical, and competitive blockers to adoption of Red Hat Lightwell, making Red Hat the source our customers' applications are built from. You will help customers close the vulnerability gap that sits between their own application code and the platform beneath it so that remediation stops consuming engineering capacity they would rather spend on their business.  
You will need to confidently articulate our value proposition to developers, build and platform engineers, application development leadership, and the security and compliance organization within the account, changing register as you move between them. This will entail hands-on work in the customer's own build environment, technical architecture walk-throughs, business-value conversations framed in engineering cost, customer-facing technical workshops, and implementation of best practices in dependency management, artifact signing, attestation, and pipeline enforcement. Adoption is ultimately a developer decision, and proving it in their build is the most persuasive conversation you will have.

You will work closely with the Lightwell business unit and engineering, helping to test, document, and demonstrate cutting-edge features, and carrying coverage gaps, ecosystem requests, and competitive intelligence back to the business unit as a defined part of the role. You will also work in close collaboration with Red Hat sales, Customer Success, Consulting Services, and partner teams to ensure a highly positive customer experience.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Deploy into requested engagements as Red Hat's technical lead for trusted software supply chain, partnering with the Account Solution Architect and Account Executive to drive Red Hat Lightwell within new and existing customer accounts

• Lead the technical conversation across three distinct audiences: developers and build engineers, application development and platform engineering leadership, and the security and compliance organization, adapting depth and framing to each.

• Articulate and defend Red Hat's differentiating position against alternative approaches in the market.

• Position the software supply chain offerings within the broader Red Hat portfolio, including hardened container images, artifact signing, attestation, SBOM generation, pipeline policy enforcement, and runtime security.

• Prove the offering in the customer's environment, configuring their build to resolve against Lightwell repositories, executing their build, and troubleshooting the result alongside their engineers.

• Facilitate pre, and post-sales activities when needed, including technical deep dives, proofs of concept, “bake-offs,” internal sprints and hackathons, and development of partner vertical-specific solutions to drive adoption of Red Hat Lightwell.

• Identify and partner with customer stakeholders, acting as an advocate within both their line-of-business and internal customer teams.

• Advise on integration with the customer's existing artifact management, mirroring, and pipeline estate, including disconnected and air-gapped environments.

• Work closely with the Lightwell business unit and engineering teams, providing a market feedback loop on the product and solutions.

• Execute community outreach and customer advocacy activities including conference speaking, blog posts, etc.

• Deliver enablement and mentoring to the Red Hat Technical Sales community to raise baseline capability on software supply chain security.

Required Qualifications:

Experience

• 6+ years in a combination of software engineering, build/release engineering, platform engineering, DevSecOps, or technical sales, including direct responsibility for software that carried real dependency and upgrade obligations.

• Demonstrated ability to work hands-on in a customer or production build environment.

Application development and build systems

• Working command of at least two of Maven, pip, and npm, including dependency resolution, transitive dependency behavior, lockfiles, and version constraint semantics.

• Practical understanding of how enterprise builds are configured, where registry and repository settings are applied, and how enterprises currently proxy and mirror public package registries.

• Hands-on experience with enterprise artifact repositories and internal mirrors.

• Ability to work directly in a customer's build environment, configuring, executing, and troubleshooting builds alongside their engineers.

• Understanding of build reproducibility, disconnected and air-gapped delivery, and multi-language codebases.

Software supply chain security

• SLSA build integrity levels and the practical requirements of Level 3.

• SBOM formats and lifecycle, including SPDX and CycloneDX, and the operational difference between generating an SBOM and acting on one.

• Artifact signing and verification, including HSM-backed signing, attestation, and enforcement at build and admission.

• VEX and CSAF, and the role of machine-readable exploitability data in vulnerability triage at scale.

• Provenance, typosquatting, and dependency confusion threat models.

• Understanding of upstream open source contribution practice and how remediations are returned to originating projects.

Communication and judgment

• Experience delivering technical presentations and leading business value sessions.

• Credibility with a working engineering audience and the presence to hold a leadership or executive conversation, including public speaking.

• Ability to represent product coverage and roadmap accurately and without overstatement, particularly where curated coverage does not yet extend.

• Willingness to travel as needed to meet the needs of the business and our customers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience as a sales engineer, technical sales, or similar role preferably at an enterprise software company, a SaaS company, or Systems Integrator

• Professional software development experience in Java or Python ecosystems, including responsibility for dependency management and release.

• Ownership of CI/CD systems, artifact repositories, or internal developer platforms at enterprise scale.

• DevSecOps experience, including integrating security tooling and policy into delivery pipelines, and familiarity with the organizational friction between security, platform, and application teams.

• Application security or product security experience, including vulnerability management, dependency risk, or secure development lifecycle work.

• Sustained participation in an upstream open source project, particularly in packaging, release engineering, or maintenance.

• Foundational knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift, and Ansible Automation Platform.

• Familiarity with the compliance regimes relevant to the geography's key accounts, and with control automation as the durable answer to audit obligation.

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterpriseopen source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Spread across 40+ countries, our associates work flexibly across work environments, from in-office, to office-flex, to fully remote, depending on the requirements of their role. Red Hatters are encouraged to bring their best ideas, no matter their title or tenure. We're a leader in open source because of our open and inclusive environment. We hire creative, passionate people ready to contribute their ideas, help solve complex problems, and make an impact.

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